The quality of health care is constantly evolving and improving. These improvements often include better medical techniques and medical practices, but may also include improvements to patient data management. By better acquiring, managing, and disseminating patient data, health care providers are able to free themselves from mundane data entry and data acquisition tasks. These tasks can consume time that could be otherwise allocated to providing care.
Many hospitals now acquire and store patient data digitally. By storing patient data digitally, health care providers have the ability to quickly search and access patient data from anywhere in the hospital at any time. However, transitioning to digital patient data posed several data compatibility issues. Data that was entered using a first format or device may not necessarily have been compatible with data that was entered using a second format or device. This was often the case as different manufacturers created different imaging devices for specialized purposes within the hospital, each device having different interfaces and different file formats that were often proprietary. As a result, standards were established to ensure interoperability of the digital data.
The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is one such established standard for digital medical imaging. A DICOM compatible device or application is guaranteed to be able to generate, produce, display, send, query, store, process, retrieve, or print any DICOM compatible image. DICOM is now used for imaging in radiology, cardiology, oncology, dentistry, surgery, neurology, mammography, radiotherapy, opthalmology, orthopedics, pediatrics, pathology, veterinary, etc. As such, DICOM is currently the preferred standard for implementing a Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) that provides a central image store for storing, retrieving, distributing, and presenting images in a hospital or other health care environment. This further ensures that by purchasing a DICOM compliant device, the hospital will be able to seamlessly integrate such a device into a Hospital Information System (HIS) and have the device view and access any image within the PACS.
The DICOM standard specifies a particular file format definition that must be adhered to in order to ensure the intercompatability and interoperability of the various devices within the HIS. Additionally, DICOM specifies a network communications protocol for the transmission and dissemination of these medical images. Therefore, a device that is compatible with the DICOM standard is a specialized device. Such a compatible device necessarily includes one or more libraries to parse and process the file format or to communicate (e.g., send and receive) using the communications protocol.
By requiring these libraries and protocols, the DICOM standard excludes many devices that are commonly used within the health care environment from being able to access digital medical images. For example, many smartphones, cellular telephones, or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) that are able to wirelessly communicate and display low resolution or high resolution images are unable to process DICOM formatted images. In some instances, these devices may be made compatible by including the necessary DICOM functionality (e.g., libraries), but at the expense of increased memory, processing, and ultimately cost that could render such functionality useless. Instead, the hospital has to invest in specialized hardware and proprietary software to fully realize the benefits that may be gleaned from a PACS that operates using the DICOM standard.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to maintain the interoperability provided by DICOM while reducing the overhead associated with adhering to the DICOM standard. For example, there is a need to enable more conventional devices (e.g., smartphones, cellular telephones, PDAs, etc.) to be utilized as compatible PACS viewing platforms irrespective of their lack of DICOM functionality. In other words, there is a need to enable these devices to send, receive, and view DICOM formatted images without necessitating change in these devices, thereby reducing costs of the health care provider.